Naanima ka ek Jharokha, Future ka.

Wednesday, 07 January 2009 15:59

Written by maverick58

Potha Vivek went to sleep gurgle complaining with just a few complaints about the pain of teething. As babysitters do, Ram and I turned on the big screen… and watched the future of TV which we had badgered our son into buying for the New Year's.

Jaise ki har mast young jodi Shanmugham and Jasminder don't have a landline phone although of course they both have mobiles and use Skype Video to keep their son  in touch with grandparents who aren't in town. But Shan and Jassy also don't have any sort of network TV connection: , no cable, no satellite dish. Their at home news and entertainment is all web-based.Like all techies.
The movie Ram and I watched was streamed from oruwebsite. 12,000 of this sites' 100,000 total movie and tv show titles are available for instant viewing on a PC. That's not a huge collection but we had little trouble finding something we had missed and wanted to see. And most importantly, all  the cheapest of the oruwebsite plans for ordering DVDs include unlimited hours of watching streamed video. You can pause and backspace a movie which is being streamed but you couldn't (without hacking) save it.Then we complained. Paying Rs.250 gave us the rights, na? And what did they do? They hiked our plan by 10 rupees and we got what we wanted.

Their PC [Shan and Jassy's] was wired to the big LCD screen for good viewing from the sofa and Ram sure does ge romantic by dimming the lights and recline with his head on my ample lap, though he sometimes complains when I have to lift one side  up and pass a wee bit of garlic-laden wind from my rear aperture. The problem is that movies are not downloaded in high definition (because of too big and slow for most Internet connections in Namma Naadu today) and sometimes the presentation briefly  freezes which could be either transmission hiccups too big to be handled by the buffer or interference from some other process on Jassy's assembled PC (my guess).

Shan and Jassy say they generally don't miss having a "real" TV connection except that they have to scroll through their news rather than have it being given to them. Lekin I'm sure they'd be happy for a link to any web-based news shows that are neutral, not the current hysteric anchors who change their opinions, over the same bit of news, at every scroll of their competitors. Jassy's never watched sports on TV and Shan's Dravidian so doesn't miss being able to watch the IPL or ICL. If he cared, he could pay to watch cricket on cricketnirvana.com.

I hope our bandwidth gets broader like my darling husband's paunch, our Internet connections then will become the only connections into our houses in this sadeli galli. But methinks programming will still exist as will serial and movie production because they will have to feed the demand from web streamers!! And I think, the concept of the "channel" will simply disappear. Some thing else will replace TV networks as places where we find stuff prepackaged to accommodate our tastes or simply as a place to buy content as oruwebsite.com is today. Cable companies will and should split into content providers accessible over Internet connections and physical providers of Internet connections giving access to all content. BSNL, MTNL, Hathway to name a few will find that they should get into the "cable" business just in time and benefit if they sell fast enough connections cheaply enough.

After punching this out with just two forefingers where is the future of entertainment, where did Shan, my son and his wife Jassy go while we were babysitting? The movies, of course. Hehehehe.

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